Found in Translation: 20 Hebrew Poets Translated by Robert Friend A Bilingual Edition

The American-born Robert Friend, who died in Jerusalem in 1998, was a distinguished poet and translator. Friend’s skill as a poet, combined with his facility for languages, allowed him to excel at the exceedingly difficult task of translating poetry. He translated some eight hundred works first written in Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, but is best known for his translations of Hebrew poetry.

The present volume contains Friend’s versions of twenty Hebrew poets: Haim Nachman Bialik, Yaakov Fichman, Yaakov Steinberg, Rachel, David Vogel, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Esther Raab, Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Hayim Lenski, Natan Alterman, Leah Goldberg, Gabriel Preil, Zelda, Yehuda Amichai, Dan Pagis, Natan Zach, David Avidan, Dalia Ravikovitch, Dalia Herz and Zali Gurevitch.

Robert Friend’s close friend, the poet and translator Gabriel Levin, has edited the late poet’s uncollected translations into a collection Friend himself could not have bettered. Not only reflecting Friend’s taste and skills, the collection has a kind of serendipitous coherence as a representative anthology of twentieth century Hebrew poetry. Robert Friend’s proposed title reflects Goethe’s inspired riposte (as Borges might have suggested) to Robert Frost: far from being ‘what gets lost in translation’ the poetry is ‘what survives translation’.

Paperback, 211 pp.

ISBN-10: 1592641741
ISBN-13: 978-1592641741